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Lower Palaeolithic tools found in the Turó de la Bateria area

The archaeologists commissioned by Girona City Council to supervise the development work at Turó de la Bateria have uncovered a lower Palaeolithic site.

Stone tools that had been worked by hominids some 150,000 years ago, at the end of the lower Palaeolithic, were found at a depth of about one metre. The tools had been fashioned by hominid groups living there before the Neanderthals; they settled at the top of the hill, and went down to the Ter river bed to gather stones for making the tools they used for butchering animals and other uses.
Turó de la Bateria, also known as Puig d'en Roca III, lies at the northern access to the city, and it is part of a lower-Palaeolithic archaeological complex that covers a large area of the middle valley of the river Ter, running as far as Sant Gregori. As an area for archaeology, it was already known on account of the work done there in the second half of the twentieth century by Eudald Carbonell, now co-director of the Atapuerca site, when a Neolithic necropolis was found.